Toxic Voices

The Villain from Early Soviet Literature to Socialist Realism

Eric Laursen

Publication Year: 2013

Satire and the fantastic, vital literary genres in the 1920s, are often thought to have fallen victim to the official adoption of socialist realism. Eric Laursen contends that these subversive genres did not just vanish or move underground. Instead, key strategies of each survive to sustain the villain of socialist realism. Laursen argues that the judgment of satire and the hesitation associated with the fantastic produce a narrative obsession with controlling the villain’s influence. In identifying a crucial connection between the questioning, subversive literature of the 1920s and the socialist realists, Laursen produces an insightful revision of Soviet literary history.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Quote

Contents

Acknowledgments

This project received the generous support of the Tanner Humanities
Center, where I was a Virgil D. Aldrich Fellow in fall 2000, and the University
of Utah, which awarded me a faculty fellowship in spring 2001; this year
of leave was crucial to beginning my work on this manuscript, and I am most
grateful. ...

Note on Transliteration

Introduction: Scrounging in the Soviet Garbage Pit

Socialist Realism, like Olesha’s “new man,” seems
to have had little use for the past except as scrap metal and spare parts for
its literary factories and collective farms where the Communist future was
always under construction. However, the villains who play such an important
part in the socialist realist plot—the kulaks and obstructionists, bourgeois
throwbacks and wreckers, ...

Chapter One: Writing a Precarious Balance

In Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s “How Robinson Was Created” (“Kak sozdavalsia Robinson,” 1933), a writer is assigned
the task of composing a “Soviet Robinson Crusoe.” He obediently drafts the
story of a sole shipwreck survivor, fighting the elements and bravely battling
a hostile environment with only his wit and resourcefulness to aid him in the
struggle. ...

Chapter Two: He Does Not Love Us When We Are Dirty

With Lenin as the state’s father figure, Soviet children
needed clean hands to make “pretty things.” On propaganda posters, in brochures,
and in public lectures Bolsheviks preached the virtue of hot water,
soap, and scrub brushes.1 Physical hygiene became a sign of mental hygiene
which could only be accomplished with political hygiene. ...

Chapter Three: Things That Should Not Be Found

By the time Gorky gave his address to the First
Congress, it was a well-worn truism that Soviet writers were to enlighten
the proletariat and help build the Communist future. During the First
Five-Year Plan, many of them had left their solitary writing lives for “direct
participation in the construction of a new life,” ...

Chapter Four: Lost in Translation

The history of prerevolutionary Russian literature is
one of secret societies, censorship, arrest, and exile, as writers attempted
social change through the printed word. Maksim Gorky’s Mother (1907),
one of the earliest prototypes for socialist realism, ends with the title character
beaten by tsarist police as she hands out propaganda pamphlets written
by her imprisoned son. ...

Conclusion: Writers Forward!

As the 1920s came to an end, proletarian
groups increasingly touted Lenin’s 1905 article on party literature as the definitive statement not only about party writers but about any writer in Soviet
society: “Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat,
‘a cog and screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism ...

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